TY - JOUR
AU - RIBEIRO, ANNA CHRISTINA
AB - What a delightful little book—forty‐three pages brimming with the sharp creativity of poet Helen Mort and the sympathetic engagement of some of the best minds in aesthetics today. The clever and productive premise of the book is to give the poet some philosophical texts to read, and for her to respond to them with a poem. Then the authors of those texts respond to the poems—in prose, have no fear—in a lovely poeticophilosophical exchange. I was fascinated at how incisively Mort captured the essence of the papers with her poems: sometimes serving as a mirror to them, other times complicating their theses, offering counterexamples, and even perhaps occasionally slyly mocking them. If anyone doubts that a poet can do philosophy, this is the book for them. Helen Mort is not only an outstanding poet, but also a deep and insightful one (is there any other way to be an outstanding poet?). At times I imagined her and Aaron Meskin, the philosopher to be congratulated for organizing this project, sitting at Opposite Café in Leeds and trying to outsmart each other. Because it occurred to me that the “ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy” of which Plato spoke in his Republic has a very personal dimension to it. One may conceive of it as a battle of egos, a battle to see who is the smarter one, who is more insightful, and who holds that elusive key to the house of truth. Meskin throws a fantastic philosophy article at Mort, and she volleys a brilliant poem right back at him that sometimes does one better than the article itself. This book shows that the quarrel, friendly as it may be between sips of fancy coffee, rages on still. Luckily, unlike most battles, this is one from which we all benefit: philosophically, poetically, and humanly. Another reason why reading this book was a particularly enjoyable experience is that I have known most of the authors in this volume for many years and, because unlike most philosophy books, this collection involved a very intimate conversation with a sensitive interlocutor about their professional work on issues that are near and dear to them, reading this book was like eavesdropping on a conversation with people I know and cherish, and whom I got to know better and cherish more. For that I am grateful, and I think others will be, too. But this is the kind of book that makes you feel that you have come to know the authors even if you have never met them. As with all good poetry, this is a book that resists describing and paraphrasing. Even selecting key passages to quote from it is hard, because each of them is too frequently preceded or followed by another passage worth quoting. But this is a short book, and I would not be doing my readers a favor by describing it too fully. Though you may learn from my testimony, as Meskin and Mort both argue in the first chapter, “something would surely be missing,” as Meskin says (p. 18). “What is it?” he asks. Primarily (to channel Malcolm Budd), the experience of the thing—the poems, the responses, the going back to the poems after reading the responses, the going back to the responses after rereading the poems, and the deeper understanding of both that follows. The resulting curiosity to look at, listen to, and read the art works mentioned, to read or reread the philosophy articles, and to reflect on one's own aesthetic experiences. But if I gave you too much, I would in addition be shortchanging your chances to perform a good deed: for if you buy the book, you will be helping the Leeds Community Foundation's (LCF) Healthy Holidays campaign, “which enables vulnerable children in Leeds to have access to food and fun activities during the school holidays” (p. 13). So do something good for these children and for yourself; buy the book, and read the book (not to the children, though; that is not what the LCF means by “fun activities”). The book has ten chapters of poems and responses, plus two codas, brief chapters reflecting on coffee, poetry, and philosophy. Besides Meskin, the philosophers represented in the book are Jon Robson (his coauthor), John Dyck, C. Thi Nguyen, Sherri Irvin, Nick Riggle, Jeanette Bicknell, Anne W. Eaton, Cynthia Freeland, Eileen John, and Eva M. Dadlez (though gender balance is easier to achieve in aesthetics than in other areas of philosophy, this is still to be lauded in the present volume). Their articles are, respectively, on aesthetic testimony (Meskin and Robson 2015), the goodness of bad art (Dyck and Matt Johnson 2017), the aesthetics of rock climbing (Nguyen 2017), the aesthetics of scratching an itch (Irvin 2008), street art (Riggle 2010), exaggerated singing performances (Bicknell 2018), art and sexual assault (Eaton 2012 and 2003), the aesthetics of portraits (Freeland 2007 and 2010), the artistic value of meals (John 2014), and the art status and ethical import of tattoos (Dadlez 2015). This is a commendable choice of articles for providing a suitably engaging array of issues in contemporary aesthetics and philosophy of art. It is noteworthy how recent most of the articles are; this in turns reveals how varied the interests of contemporary aestheticians are, and speaks to a rich and thriving area of philosophy. Although every poem in the book has a line or more in it that I love, possibly my favorite poem is the first, “Testimony”: “My coffee cooling in a tiny, frosted glass. I don't have to taste it to know it's good” (p. 16). This may seem like a bit of a cheat on Meskin and Robson's view on testimony, since presumably Mort's testimony here is her own, from past experiences at the same coffee shop, rather than the testimony of others. But neither is present experience, and so we are invited to reflect on the difference between those two sources of information as grounds for our aesthetic judgments. Mort then describes the triptych of photographs beneath which she sits. As Meskin notes, photographs also function as testimony, offering us evidence of what is not present. But Mort leaves us hanging—what is the third photograph picturing? She never tells us. Is she suggesting that testimony can never give us everything, that it will always fall short, leave something out? And yet, “the water rises past the frame,” invading our space. And then the lovely closing: “I don't need to say your name/or ever think of you to keep you near.” Love asserts itself as the ultimate testimony—the magic that makes the absent present, the unseen felt. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, philosophers. The exchange around the goodness of bad art is excellent, and I learned from both the poet and the philosopher. The poet, predictably for an artist perhaps, protests “Don't tell me I can't love the Monet‐blue/of a VK bottle” (p. 19), then confesses she is speaking of past tastes “from the sympathetically translated future.” The philosopher picks up on that, noting that, from the “perpetually cool” present, we may look back in horror at our earlier aesthetic preferences, “our haircuts and mustaches” (p. 21). Our bewilderment explains our enjoyment of bad art as well as bad style: How could they? How could I? Dyck's remark that “The colors were gaudy, but the gaudiness only makes them better” (p. 21) reminded me of Jerrold Levinson's “Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility” (Contemplating Art [Oxford University Press, 2001], pp. 315–335), where Levinson argues that “gaudy” may sometimes be a good‐making feature of an art work (p. 317); or, as both Dyck and Mort highlight here, an aspect of personal style. Gaudiness comes up again in “Christina at the Super Bowl,” the title of the poem in response to Bicknell's thoughts on Aguilera's over‐the‐top singing in 2011, in which the singer turned “the word brave into a highway with no speed limits” (p. 31). Mort is hilarious in her description of Aguilera's singing, but she is not just playing along with the philosopher. She challenges Bicknell with an example from her childhood and by the end of the poem what we have is a wake‐up call from the downtrodden. I was moved by the quietude and humility of Bicknell's response. Is the poet challenging or mocking the rock climber? It was only after reading “The Angler” that I went back and noticed its title, which left me puzzled. An angler is a fisherman—something odd to call a rock climber—but also a scheming person, someone who is “angling” for something he may not deserve. She says, “I admire him:/bouldering above a river” but “The grass shivers/with laughter” (p. 22). He never changes the sky, “the ground drawing him back.” I was left with the impression that the poet felt the need to bring the philosopher down a notch. Nguyen's response made me think that perhaps my interpretation was not far off the mark, inasmuch as it was entirely autobiographical and engaged little with the poem itself. I heard echoes between Riggle's graffiti artists, who “write themselves into existence” by transforming their space (p. 29), and Dadlez's tattoo bearer, who might “transmute the person others see” (p. 45). And I challenge anyone to hear “Chalet Lines” the same way again after reading Mort's eponymous poem (p. 34) and Eaton's response to it (pp. 35–36). I was between moved and amused by the maternal shape of “Itch” and Irvin's poetic response to it. Speaking of shapes, I wondered at Mort's formal choices. I tried to find a common rationale for her line breaks, her occasional rhymes, her stanzas versus couplets versus concrete‐style word sprawl, but I could not. Perhaps this is meant to reflect the variety of aesthetic topics and authorial styles. Be that as it may, when it comes to the other quintessential feature of poetry, namely figuratively language, there is no question that Mort is a poet of imagery. Her tropes startle and illuminate in equal measure, always perfect descriptions of their subjects: “Wine‐stained and gig‐drunk, we pitched our bodies home” (p. 34); “My mind wears an expensive dress and cheap shoes” (p. 37); “Learning to eat again/is like learning to run/down a mountainside” (p. 40). Quoting these lines, good as they are, out of their context does not do them justice, however; one must read the poems in their entirety. The poet engages with the philosophy acutely and inspiringly, and the philosophers by and large seem to have learned from the poet in return—this quarrel is mind expanding. But, as Freeland notes, “The poet's mind is a tease. It dances out of reach, reluctant to be pinned down” (p. 38). We may know the philosophers, but we would have liked to know the poet a bit better. What, for instance, does Mort think of the poetic art itself? What are her thoughts on form, on imagery, on ontology, on oral versus written poems, on the value of poetry relative to other art forms? None of the philosophy articles the poet responded to are about poetry, and the only philosopher in the book who frequently writes about poetry, Eileen John, has an article about food as her target article. Perhaps it was too obvious, or in‐your‐face, confrontational even, to have a philosopher of poetry in a book of this kind. Nevertheless, just as I will be forever grateful to have been introduced to the work of Helen Mort, I will be forever jealous that I was not part of it. © The American Society for Aesthetics This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The American Society for Aesthetics
TI - Helen Mort and Aaron Meskin. Opposite: Poems, Philosophy & Coffee. Scarborough, UK: Valley Press, 2019, 60 pp., £9.99 paperBook Reviews
JO - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
DO - 10.1111/jaac.12731
DA - 2020-05-18
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/helen-mort-and-aaron-meskin-opposite-poems-philosophy-coffee-0KsQsfaDZm
SP - 246
EP - 248
VL - 78
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -